Believing You Can When You Can’t

Some singers only think they can sing. Tell them they can’t and you have a hearing problem.

Believing you can when you can’t frustrates others and hinders you. Some leaders only believe they can lead.

Deadly weaknesses masquerade as strength.

What if you’re not really great at:

Delegating.

Organizing.

Motivating.

Encouraging.

Negotiating.

Public speaking.

Running meetings.

What if the issue is you, not them? Feels awkward doesn’t it?

When you believe you can when you can’t:

Issues, faults, and failures become their issues, not yours. The problem is their ears not your glorious voice.

Better is enough. “If you knew how I led meetings in the past, you’d stop complaining about how I lead them now.”

Improvement stops. Why would you improve your speaking skills when you are a great speaker already? What’s been attained is never improved.

Talking is skill. During a recent leadership meeting we discussed the importance of delegating authority rather than tasks. Delegating tasks creates followers. Delegating authority creates leaders. However, in the next breath we delegated tasks. I thought I was good at delegating because I talked the concepts. In reality, I hadn’t adequately defined scope of authority or vision. I ended up delegating tasks.

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24 thoughts on “Believing You Can When You Can’t”

A challenging and amazing post. I recently asked a question on my blog speaking to this same point. The post title and question is…Are You The Leader The Team You Want To Lead Wants To Follow? Asking this of myself regularly keeps me reaching for better.

It goes very well with yesterday’s post. In fact, I referred back to it when reading today’s post and said, “Yep, yep, yep – that would help me have a true sense of my strengths and weaknesses.”

Great, humble leadership helps immeasurably, I think, with this issue of seeing ourselves honestly. Great leaders are not afraid to ask, “How do I do this better?” Arrogant leaders assume, “Hey, I’m doing this better than anybody else I see around me.”

Love the tension between the two sentences. One a question the other a statement.

Here’s a question for you, “What do you think I’m trying to accomplish?” That might get interesting and honest feedback. Try it rather than telling people what you are doing and then asking how well or poorly you are doing it.

Thank you for this reminder. Leaders can have some skills, but skill alone doesn’t make for good leader-follower relationships.

I lead a team of about 45 engineers in-house, and about the same number outside our organization who work for vendor-partners. The more I age, the more I become aware how few the skills I have as a leader/manager contribute to results, and just how skilled and wonderful my team is.

They are great people, very well educated, hard-working, engaged. We have less than 5% turnover per year, none of it in the past 2 years motivated by unhappiness with the job.

The work is fun, but hard. We have long work weeks, are part of a pre-revenue company with very hard-to-achieve goals in a complex environment. Uncertainty is the norm, yet fear is not.

I don’t think I’m their boss because I am more skilled. Rather it is because I have been tasked with helping this team to contribute to the organization’s goals, and they dig in. They respond very well to my persistent, clumsy efforts to move us forwards, to encourage, to discipline, to thank, to drive out fear, to plan, to be resilient, etc. I pull hard in my harness, and they do as well.

This is not a contest of wills or of skills, but a joint and sustained effort undertaken by fine people with scant resources, but common purpose. We don’t always agree on methods, but we make things happen and continue to go in the right direction.

I am indeed blessed to be part of this team, have never worked harder, never had more fun. The magic sauce isn’t my skill, for I’m surrounded by uber-intelligent and skilled people. I believe it is truly having a common purpose, and pursuing it incessantly with the most integrity we can.

Stuck in the ol’ time space continuum here today Dan, so I went off on that verb tense tangent, because it does have power.

What we have been does not mean that is who we are. What we have achieved does not mean we will continue to achieve. This goes both positively and negatively as self-fulfilling prophecy. “See I was right, I am no good at delegating, I never will be.” “I’ve always been good at presenting.” What we tell ourselves in a nanosecond colors our perception of what we can/will do.

Even the choice of verbs has power. “I need to…” “or I want to keep improving at delegating.”

When a leader believes s/he has arrived, the reality may be that their ship has left, they just didn’t/don’t know it yet.

what good is it, if the team tell the leader what s/he wants to hear far fear off saying the truth and then they get in trouble, no one likes to be told the truth because it will enflate their ego …forget it